what's striking to me using the ignore is just how many pages and pages of posts TPTB-dick has been spamming to derail substantive and meaningful discussion. there is no doubt he has an alternative motive which is anti-Bitcoin.

I don't share other people's commitment to unmoderated, uncensored discussions... they have their place, but allowing every thread to let in trolls as a principle of free speech is like letting strangers into your house (instead of invited guests) based on the right to free assembly.

Which is a long way of saying... cypherdoc, you should start a "Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. [moderated]" thread. All of the intelligent people will migrate over, and then you can just kick out the trolls.

Haha no chance, such an action would be akin to throwing in the towel. After all this history?

The history isn't going anywhere... it's not like we would be deleting a thread. In fact, I would start the new thread with the first post including a link to the old thread. *shrugs*

"Their verdict was: "Absolutely nothing to see. The local Tibetans make sure everything is overpriced.""

point being, all the devs who look down on the masses as stupid & irrational as justification for authoritarian practices regarding decisions in Bitcoin are severely underestimating the power of money to motivate ppl to understand the economics of value transaction. i see this everywhere in the Bitcoin community and it's an attitude that will cost those who employ that attitude in many ways more than just in their pocketbooks.

the great thing about TPTB spamming this thread is he brings attention to our message. there will always be ppl who listen and get roped in by his distractions but for those of us who want to go back to the days when we were able to engage in productive, informative, and theoretical discussion of Bitcoin, i would recommend you just ignore him. it'll make your days much better as i am realizing. wasting one's weekend beating down a troll isn't productive.

where is TPTB-dickhead anyways? it's been 8h since his last post. that must be a record. we'll see if Ignore really works.

btw, i WANT him to spam this thread. that way it'll drive up more views and keep pushing it to the top of the Spec Forum so as to attract new readers and existing users to read what the rest of us have to say.

"Their verdict was: "Absolutely nothing to see. The local Tibetans make sure everything is overpriced.""

point being, all the devs who look down on the masses as stupid & irrational as justification for authoritarian practices regarding decisions in Bitcoin are severely underestimating the power of money to motivate ppl to understand the economics of value transaction. i see this everywhere in the Bitcoin community and it's an attitude that will cost those who employ that attitude in many ways more than just in their pocketbooks.

What I found most interesting about that article is that the energy could not find a market until the miner showed up. A long time ago I mentioned that bitcoin mining might allow energy providers to over-provision variable energy sources (wind, solar and to a lesser extent hydro). This would be a good thing for the world, because it means a lower fossil component during marginal production days (cloudy or not that windy).

It looks like that's exactly what is happening here -- but coincidentally rather than in a planned manner.

RE: TPTB, I tend to ignore people who consistently reply multiple times in a row during a conversation. Because there is a pathology there... they are writing more for themselves than for others. The exception to this rule of course is the guy who is stimulating conversation in a thread by citing interesting new news, etc. Cypherdoc in this thread and adam in the classic wall observer for example.

"Their verdict was: "Absolutely nothing to see. The local Tibetans make sure everything is overpriced.""

point being, all the devs who look down on the masses as stupid & irrational as justification for authoritarian practices regarding decisions in Bitcoin are severely underestimating the power of money to motivate ppl to understand the economics of value transaction. i see this everywhere in the Bitcoin community and it's an attitude that will cost those who employ that attitude in many ways more than just in their pocketbooks.

What I found most interesting about that article is that the energy could not find a market until the miner showed up. A long time ago I mentioned that bitcoin mining might allow energy providers to over-provision variable energy sources (wind, solar and to a lesser extent hydro). This would be a good thing for the world, because it means a lower fossil component during marginal production days (cloudy or not that windy).

It looks like that's exactly what is happening here -- but coincidentally rather than in a planned manner.

RE: TPTB, I tend to ignore people who consistently reply multiple times in a row during a conversation. Because there is a pathology there... they are writing more for themselves than for others. The exception to this rule of course is the guy who is stimulating conversation in a thread by citing interesting new news, etc. Cypherdoc in this thread and adam in the classic wall observer for example.

that is a good pt. but look at it from the other side as well; that being the costs of gold mining.

not only is it a shame the little African kid has to climb down a 100yd hole but it is more shameful that we have huge strip mining operations not only in Africa but all over the world here in the US, Canada, Australia, and China, etc. one of the worthy goals Bitcoin should strive to achieve is to eliminate that waste and corruption. imagine getting all those ppl and their fiat involved in those operations to switch to Bitcoin or Bitcoin mining. remember the gold mine sold in Canada for Bitcoin? well, i met a lady in March while in Hawaii who owns a gold mine up in Alaska and we got to talking about Bitcoin. she had already heard about it and of course i talked at length multiple times during the trip about Bitcoin replacing gold. she's a smart girl and the wheels were turning in her mind. i then helped her set up a VPN on her iphone as well as download Breadwallet to which i sent her some coin. i'm meaning to follow up with her sometime later this year to see if she moved on it but i bet she will. these types of stories are happening all over the world right now and i claim it is being reflected in the gold and silver price.

A lot of large companies, especially those that operate semi-autonomous business units use internal accounting to handle transactions between these units. So a project manager might have a budget of 1M and he purchases marketing services from the mkting dept, engineering from the dev group, etc. But obviously money is not actually moved around...

You can see how a private intra-company blockchain could be very useful here, for auditing and real-time tracking purposes. For external services, you would even "pay" CoCoins to the financial dept. and they would cut and mail a check externally.

This BNY effort is probably the first step towards a consulting business setting this up for companies.

EDIT: yes you have a great point about gold. And hopefully the same will happen with diamonds (grown in a lab). Sometimes I think that the best way to handle some of these areas with horrible human rights records is to leave them alone. But, as we learned with conflict diamonds, realistically and unfortunately that only works if they don't have anything the first world wants.

what's striking to me using the ignore is just how many pages and pages of posts TPTB-dick has been spamming to derail substantive and meaningful discussion. there is no doubt he has an alternative motive which is anti-Bitcoin.

A lot of large companies, especially those that operate semi-autonomous business units use internal accounting to handle transactions between these units. So a project manager might have a budget of 1M and he purchases marketing services from the mkting dept, engineering from the dev group, etc. But obviously money is not actually moved around...

You can see how a private intra-company blockchain could be very useful here, for auditing and real-time tracking purposes. For external services, you would even "pay" CoCoins to the financial dept. and they would cut and mail a check externally.

This BNY effort is probably the first step towards a consulting business setting this up for companies.

EDIT: yes you have a great point about gold. And hopefully the same will happen with diamonds (grown in a lab). Sometimes I think that the best way to handle some of these areas with horrible human rights records is to leave them alone. But, as we learned with conflict diamonds, realistically and unfortunately that only works if they don't have anything the first world wants.

the real question is why that internal accounting wouldn't continue to be more efficient and even more secure using a traditional SQL database? are they really having any internal accounting fraud to incentive them to set up an entirely foreign means of accounting that could be subject to unknown types of hacks from the outside or even inside? what drives security of this model? can't be POW. w/o POW why couldn't it be gamed?

what's striking to me using the ignore is just how many pages and pages of posts TPTB-dick has been spamming to derail substantive and meaningful discussion. there is no doubt he has an alternative motive which is anti-Bitcoin.

The debate is: is centralization of development the path to decentralization of nodes?

You just need 1 ring to rule them all.

lukejr who has abused this power in the past is part of a small block of Core developers, who argues the majority of developers think that 1 ring to rule them all central development is good.

There are other developers who are invested in technologies that will benefit from a delay in block size increase.

They also argue that we need decentralized nodes but they should use the centralized consensus of their development group

And developers outside that group aren't lead developers. (Paraphrasing nullc)

This approach is centralized control of nodes, it's not the decentralized goal I'm invested in.

and then there's marcus who popped in here taunting all of us in glee of a trainwrecked thread. almost as if he had something to do with it...i doubt it but who knows.

the disturbing thing he said was that him and his centralized crew of authoritarian devs were going to "show us who is driving this airplane" or something extremist like that. you can go look it up from yesterday. that is a big problem.

my contention is that there are plenty of bright, motivated devs out there who would show greater humility and core values to what Bitcoin represents as a public good.

A lot of large companies, especially those that operate semi-autonomous business units use internal accounting to handle transactions between these units. So a project manager might have a budget of 1M and he purchases marketing services from the mkting dept, engineering from the dev group, etc. But obviously money is not actually moved around...

You can see how a private intra-company blockchain could be very useful here, for auditing and real-time tracking purposes. For external services, you would even "pay" CoCoins to the financial dept. and they would cut and mail a check externally.

This BNY effort is probably the first step towards a consulting business setting this up for companies.

EDIT: yes you have a great point about gold. And hopefully the same will happen with diamonds (grown in a lab). Sometimes I think that the best way to handle some of these areas with horrible human rights records is to leave them alone. But, as we learned with conflict diamonds, realistically and unfortunately that only works if they don't have anything the first world wants.

the real question is why that internal accounting wouldn't continue to be more efficient and even more secure using a traditional SQL database? are they really having any internal accounting fraud to incentive them to set up an entirely foreign means of accounting that could be subject to unknown types of hacks from the outside or even inside? what drives security of this model? can't be POW. w/o POW why couldn't it be gamed?

This is a good question. I will ask around. We need to first divide the problem into 2 systems:

1. Internal accounting for an external client. Lawyers and many government sponsored projects need to carefully account for their time, for example. The ability to track all the coins backwards lets you do that in a way that can't be retroactively "massaged"

2. Straight internal accounting.

I can make some guesses right now though... the point of keeping the actual $ away from the internal txns is to eliminate internal fraud. However, there can be lots of other non-fraud issues -- like why is it always such a shocker when projects go over budget? Examination of spending on an internal blockchain can show these trends before the annual monster audit.

In terms of security, there are lots of choices. The most likely candidate would be where everyone runs SPV wallets, and the finance department runs a few trusted miner nodes. We don't need to solve trustless consensus for this application -- the finance dept is not going to be 51%ing their own network because no mining reward, and blacklisting addresses is essentially a feature (if someone gets fired their CoCoin is automatically reaped for example). What they really need is a database with immutable per-record signatures tied to company employees.

Difficulty is "nice to have" because it makes it very hard in practice to rewrite the blockchain with a fake one starting from six months ago (say). But even if the finance dept bought 100x its baseline mining capacity to do some massive 6 month ago fork of the blockchain to a completely fraudulent record, it would take massive company-wide participation in the fraud since everyone would have to surrender their private keys.

what's striking to me using the ignore is just how many pages and pages of posts TPTB-dick has been spamming to derail substantive and meaningful discussion. there is no doubt he has an alternative motive which is anti-Bitcoin.

I don't share other people's commitment to unmoderated, uncensored discussions... they have their place, but allowing every thread to let in trolls as a principle of free speech is like letting strangers into your house (instead of invited guests) based on the right to free assembly.

Which is a long way of saying... cypherdoc, you should start a "Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. [moderated]" thread. All of the intelligent people will migrate over, and then you can just kick out the trolls.

I personally make it a point to never comment on any moderated thread if I notice that status.

I use moderation as a gauge of credibility. Very few people moderate 'their' thread, and it seems to be people who tend to be on an opposite side as me. Sometimes it is the reverse though. I am always disappointed to see this. There are some people who are at least trolls and possibly shills who are on MY side of the 1MB argument. I enjoy their work often enough, but don't find them very credible. When they moderate a troll post it quashes whatever credibility is left.

Moderation of a thread is for weak-ass losers IMHO. I might as well use reddit or some similar bullshit platform if censorship appealed to me. I respect the degree of freedom that theymos employs in operating this platform and his mods very rarely censor except in the most extreme situations (and I think they are shit-caned when they are caught acting otherwise.) I'm glad that theymos does offer the ability for people to moderate because it is one more tool to help separate the wheat from the chaff.

Actually, I may suggest on the meta board that more attention is called out to moderated threads. Perhaps a more visible tag in the subject.

"Their verdict was: "Absolutely nothing to see. The local Tibetans make sure everything is overpriced.""

point being, all the devs who look down on the masses as stupid & irrational as justification for authoritarian practices regarding decisions in Bitcoin are severely underestimating the power of money to motivate ppl to understand the economics of value transaction. i see this everywhere in the Bitcoin community and it's an attitude that will cost those who employ that attitude in many ways more than just in their pocketbooks.

Good. These things are not necessary for bitcoin proliferation: Education, economic or otherwise, gigabit internet, high end phones, savings. It is not those things that have kept the people of North Korea, Eritrea, Venezuela or Haiti back, it is nonfreedom, or governments. The only thing that is necessary for people to flourish, is hunger, or swung positively, lust for life.

"Their verdict was: "Absolutely nothing to see. The local Tibetans make sure everything is overpriced.""

point being, all the devs who look down on the masses as stupid & irrational as justification for authoritarian practices regarding decisions in Bitcoin are severely underestimating the power of money to motivate ppl to understand the economics of value transaction. i see this everywhere in the Bitcoin community and it's an attitude that will cost those who employ that attitude in many ways more than just in their pocketbooks.

Good. These things are not necessary for bitcoin proliferation: Education, economic or otherwise, gigabit internet, high end phones, savings. It is not those things that have kept the people of North Korea, Eritrea, Venezuela or Haiti back, it is nonfreedom, or governments. The only thing that is necessary for people to flourish, is hunger, or swung positively, lust for life.

and it will be those ppl who will most resist gvt censorship of Bitcoin. but only if they are given a chance to use it reliably & cheaply. we should all want to give it to them, not out of altruism, but out of our own greed; as in greater security of our coins and in creating digital gold.